That video was shot by Daniel Lowe as he drove through western Colorado and eastern Utah. Where I live there’s substantial light pollution, but out by Gunnison the skies get dark (one of the many reasons my wife and I held a Science Getaways there), and the stars are magnificent.

Advertisement

And the geology! Some of it is lifted up, some of it eroded down, but there’s a billion years of history tucked away in the American Southwest. This is an astonishing place to live.

And that spillway/waterfall at 01:20? Lowe told me that’s south of Ouray on highway 550. That’s a bit of a haul from my neck of the woods, but if I’m ever out that way, I’ll have to stop and see. This planet is a source of unending delights.

My apologies, everyone: After we put up this week’s episode of Crash Course Astronomy (about exoplanets), we found an error in one of the animations that got past us.

In some cases where a mistake is found we can simply annotate the video and move on. However, in this case the animation was explaining an important concept that couldn’t simply be corrected in the video itself. Faced with this we decided to take it down, fix the animation, and re-upload the video. Given the time that will take, we also decided to simply wait until next Thursday to re-release it, to keep the episode order on track.

Advertisement

So, the exoplanets episode will go back up Thursday, August 6 at 21:00 UTC (5:00 p.m. EDT). Again, I’m sorry about this, but we’d rather be late than keep a fixable mistake in the series! Thank for your patience, and I hope it’s worth the wait.

I was out strolling recently on a cloudy day, and—as I always do—I took a quick look around the sky to see if anything interesting was to be seen.

I do so love that habit. This particular time, I was greeted with a most unusual sight: a rainbow segment, just a small arc levitating in the clouds. It was raining in that direction, so there were raindrops in the air, a critical component to make a rainbow.

Advertisement

But the other half of that recipe is sunlight, and that day was almost completely overcast. Almost. In the west there was a small break in the clouds, enough to let a single shaft of sunlight through. That illuminated the suspended raindrops, refracted, and created the partial bow.

What I love about this, though, is that you can see that shaft of light! Haze, raindrops, and other particulates in the air scattered that light, reflected it back to me, lighting up in the path of that sunbeam, contrasted with the storm clouds behind it. And you can tell that the opening in the clouds to the west wasn’t fully open; there must have been a small cloud in the middle to account for the shadow ray piercing through the light shaft and arc.

Mind you, there was no other hint of a rainbow anywhere else in the sky. That was it, the only clear sunlight available. And it was only those raindrops, seen at just the right angle, that allowed me the view of the broken spectral arc. Someone a kilometer away in the wrong direction wouldn’t have seen anything at all. I was at the right place at just the right time.

David: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

Kirk [sadly, resigned]: Just words.

Advertisement

David: But good words! That's where ideas begin.

In June of 1982, I found myself waiting in a long, long line at a mall. I had just graduated high school, and was spending the summer doing what innumerable kids my age had done for decades: eagerly and nervously anticipating going to college in a few months, working at my part-time job (for me, slogging through the brutally humid Virginia weather at 5 a.m. to deliver the Washington Post to more than 100 of my neighbors), hanging out with friends, reading sci-fi books, going to the mall to play video games, and watching movies.

And oh, those movies. The summer of 1982 was magic. Magic! The science-fiction movies that came out in those few short months would change the way movies were made. Think I’m exaggerating? Here are a few of the movies that came out in 1982: Blade Runner. The Thing. Poltergeist. E.T, the Extra-Terrestrial. Tron …

And, of course, one of my favorite movies of all time, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. When the first movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) came out, we hardcore arrogant and smug fans hated it. It was long, boring, and preachy. It was mocked unceasingly and mercilessly for years. But then Khan came out, and all was forgiven; faster paced, big battles, great tension, and far more personal, Khan was what we had craved.

Oh, how my pulse raced when I saw this on the screen.

Photo by Paramount Pictures

I’m older, less of an ass, and hopefully wiser now, and appreciate the first movie far more than I did as a hot-headed kid. And yet, Khan still touches something primally Trek in me. The music still sings to me (I had the soundtrack on vinyl, copied it to cassette so I could listen in my Walkman, then on CD, and now digitally; a dynasty that’s lasted for electronic generations), and the scenes in the Mutara nebula still put me on the edge of my seat.

All that was ahead of me, though, as I stood in line at the mall with 100 people ahead of me. Over the course of an hour I was joined by my friends, coincidentally, a chunk of my graduating class wanting to see Khan on opening day. By the time the box office opened there more over a dozen of us (100 people from the front of the line), eagerly chatting away with nervous excitement.

Your host in 1982. Most of that hair was left somewhere in Virginia.

Courtesy of Phil Plait

I had no idea at that moment what lay ahead of me in my life: a disastrous first year at college, dropping out because I wasn’t nearly ready for it emotionally, an ego-stomping year of living at home with my parents as I got my act (partially) together, then finishing out college, going to grad school, meeting my future wife, having a daughter, and everything else that life delivers that is simultaneously mundane and glorious.

I’m not sure any of that would’ve registered with me anyway. I was an immature kid, wrapped up in the excitement of seeing Kirk and Spock on the big screen again.

The mundanity of the descriptions belies the changes that were about to happen. (This was before the Spoiler Alert, obviously.) Watching that clip from 33 years ago (!!), seeing it as if I were that young once again, catching the 5 o’clock local news, made me smile. It was a great summer.

There’s a lot to be said for the present, too. My daughter somehow caught the Trek bug, and is now a full-fledged Federation dork. I’m bouncing in my seat waiting for her to finish watching the original series so we can see the movies together. I cannot wait to see Khan once again, chewing up the Enterprise as thoroughly as he did the scenery, Kirk’s tactics, Spock’s final (heh) scene.

I wonder how much of the movie I’ll spend sneaking peeks at my daughter’s face, to see how she reacts. Passing down our stories is part of what makes us human, and seeing it with her will, I think, make me feel young, as when the world was new.

I think one of the most interesting facts in astronomy is a simple one to state: Galaxies are cannibals. They eat each other.

The Milky Way grew huge this way; our galaxy is in the top tier of spirals in the Universe. (Many are bigger, but the vast majority are far smaller.) It got that way by colliding and merging with smaller galaxies, enlarging its ranks over time. It’s actually in the process of eating several dwarf galaxies right now. Like, literally, at this very moment.

Advertisement

But what of these smaller galaxies? What happens to them?

Some merge completely with the bigger galaxy, a completely digestible meal. But sometimes parts of the smaller galaxy survive. If the center is compact and dense enough, it can make it through the ordeal.

These galaxies are small and luminous, and incredibly dense with stars. Through ground-based telescopes they’re so small they look like foreground stars, and through Hubble their dense nature but slightly visible fuzzy halos that make them look like distant galaxies. That’s how they avoided discovery for so long: They slipped between the cracks.

These objects are the densest galaxies known. Our Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars, but they’re spread out over a hundred thousand light-years. One of the new UCDs just discovered has far fewer stars—something like 10 million—but it’s only about 20 light-years across!

NGC 6934, a typical globular cluster. A UCD would be about the same size, but have 10-to-100 times as many stars in it.

Phto by ESA/Hubble & NASA

That’s really weird. I mean, really weird. It has the size of a typical globular cluster (a spherical cluster containing a hundred thousand stars or so) but is a hundred times denser!

Another UCD found is less extreme but still pretty amazing: It’s about 200 light-years across and has a hundred million stars in it. That’s far larger than a globular cluster, with a lot more stars.

It’s their incredibly compact nature that helped them survive being a galactic snack. This video should help make that clear:

The small galaxy is in a tight orbit around the center of a much larger galaxy. Tides from the big galaxy strip the outer stars off the smaller one; in a sense the gravity they feel from the bigger galaxy is larger, so they get peeled away from the smaller one. Stars closer in to the center of the small galaxy are more tightly bound, and stay together.

After a few passes all the outer stars are ripped away, and what’s left is just the compact nucleus of the smaller galaxy: an ultra compact dwarf. In fact, spectra taken of the UCDs show they resemble the cores of galaxies.

You’d expect to find these objects near bigger galaxies, and sure enough both of the new objects are physically close to much beefier galaxies. Note only that the larger galaxies show signs of recent disturbances (basically, weird overall shapes) indicating they recently underwent a collision and merger.

This work is impressive. It’s not often you find a new kind of astronomical object, especially when examples of them are sitting right in images that have been around for years. But their borderline nature between star clusters and proper galaxies effectively hid them.

I’ve long said that we have to be careful and not let our prejudices blind us to objects that are neither one thing or another (cough cough Pluto cough). In this case, I’m glad this team was able to see these UCDs for what they are.

And I have to add: The astronomers who found them were undergrads, students at San José State University! They combed through archived data taken by several different telescopes to identify potential ultra compact galaxies, then followed up using observations to nail down their characteristics. It’s quite an accomplishment!

And a reminder to not always dismiss something just because it conforms to your own predisposed beliefs. Look around you! What are you missing?

The planet is actually 1.6 times the Earth’s diameter, and if I were a betting man, I’d wager it’s not Earthlike at all. Given what we think we understand about planets, it’s as likely to have a thick atmosphere like Neptune's as one like Earth's. Maybe more likely. But we just don’t know.

Advertisement

Despite this, a lot of headlines were screaming about an Earthlike planet found, calling it “Earth’s twin.” Feh.

In fact, I feel “feh” so strongly that I wrote all about this for my biweekly column for Sen.com. You can go there to get the details of my “feh”-ness. It’s subscription only, but that includes getting lots of articles by lots of good writers … and there are more to come. You’ll like it.

And to be clear: I am excited about the discovery of this planet, and its implications. I just wish stuff like this weren't overhyped.

“No, no. We have already succeeded. I mean, what are the terrors of the Comet? One, the ice venting—no problem. There's a popping sound preceding each; we can avoid that. Two, the sinkhole, which you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too.”

—The Dread Astronomer Westley Roberts

Advertisement

The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is heading toward the Sun, and as it does, it slowly dies.

But what a death. Underneath its crusty surface are icy deposits, and as the comet nears the Sun, these warm. The ice turns directly to gas and blows out of vents, forming gorgeous and delicate streamers of water vapor dozens of kilometers long. The picture at the top of the article shows the long-distance view of this; from 177 kilometers away, the Rosetta spacecraft sees quite a few of these jets.

Sinkholes on Earth are relatively common; water (for example) can erode away material under the surface, and at some point gravity takes over, and the structural integrity gives way. The surface collapses, sometimes taking cars or even houses with it.

On a comet things are slightly different. For one, the gravity is only a tiny fraction of Earth’s. For another, sinkholes on Earth tend not to jet towers of water vapor out from them.

But the overall idea is the same. Heat from the Sun warms the comet. This heat leaks under the surface (possibly through cracks) and turns the ice into gas, which then leaks out. Eventually a large cavity is formed under the surface, so big that the “roof” of material over it collapses, forming the steep-walled sinkholes.

This allows light to flood in, which can heat the ice rapidly, causing an outburst of jetting from the comet. This has been seen on 67P, too. Eventually, the walls of the hole erode as more ice vaporizes, and the steep pits become more shallow. Quite a few of these are seen on 67P as well. This means the steep pits are young, and the shallow ones old.

Comets are so cool. And this one has turned out to be a fantastic choice for an extended visit by Rosetta. We’re learning so much about these interplanetary wanderers, and, unsurprisingly, it’s all been really amazing.

Through an article in ForbesI saw that a new study has been published about the safety of Gardasil, a vaccine for prevention of certain strains of human papillomavirus, or HPV.

HPV is a virus that can lead to genital warts, many types of cancer, and cervical cancer in women, which kills 4,000 women every year in the U.S. alone.

Advertisement

The Gardasil vaccine, on the other hand, caused some people to faint after getting it, and others got mild skin infections—both of which occur somewhat rarely with other vaccines too, as you might expect.

Which sounds worse to you?

The study, published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, looked at the published data about effects from the vaccine and found that it has a “favorable safety profile.” This study comes after many other previous studies that show essentially the same thing. There is no correlation between getting the Gardasil vaccine and seriously adverse effects such as “autoimmune diseases (including Guillain-Barre Syndrome and multiple sclerosis), anaphylaxis, venous thromboembolism, and stroke.”

Mind you, all these things and more have been used by people who attack vaccines as an argument against it. And, just like essentially every claim made by the anti-vaccination movement, these arguments are wrong.

It’s very frustrating; mounds of data show these vaccinations are incredibly low-risk, but it only takes a little bit of doubt and fear to make vaccine rates drop. For example, a young girl died tragically not long after getting the vaccine, and it got a lot of press, but it was later found that she died of a completely unrelated cause. This, sadly, is expected; more than 178 million doses of Gardasil have been given worldwide, and given that huge number it’s a statistical certainty that some young people will die not long after getting them. But as the saying goes, correlation is not causation. The vaccines are not to blame here.

Even more frustrating about this vaccine is that it’s being fought by an unusual group of people; while most anti-vax leanings are not affiliated with any particular political persuasion, Gardasil gets attacked additionally by conservatives who think that girls getting it will become more promiscuous, because HPV is a sexually transmitted disease.

It’s like Bizarro world, where everything is backward. All the evidence shows Gardasil to be safe and to be effective against a virus that causes horrific illnesses. It also shows that the claims made by anti-vaxxers are wrong, and that people fighting the vaccine because of their own sexual biases are making things far worse.

And yet they dig in. They insist real science is wrong, that their anecdotes are better, that the entire medical industry is on the take (which is silly beyond reason).

But that’s where we are. When it comes to health issues, especially ones tied to sexuality, reason goes out the window and emotions take over.

That’s why I am very, very clear about this: I and my family are all up to date with our vaccinations, and my daughter has had all three stages of the Gardasil vaccine (we’d have done that if she had been a boy, too). As a parent, as someone who knows and loves someone with an autoimmune disorder, and as a person who knows just how truly awful so many diseases are and how easily and safely they can be prevented, I am a strong advocate for vaccinations.

It’s your body, but it affects literally everyone around you. Don’t listen to the anti-vaxxers, who just want to scare you. Get the facts. And please, talk to your board-certified doctor and find out if there are any vaccinations you need.

Studying the Sun from Earth can be frustrating. From 150 million kilometers away, we can only see one side at a time. Sure, the Sun rotates, so we see the whole thing over the course of about a month, but sometimes you want to see it from different angles at the same time, like when it shoots out an explosive flare or coronal mass ejection.

Right now, STEREO-A (A for Ahead) is almost directly opposite the Sun from us. In fact, it was behind the Sun for a few days, but even before and after that it was so close to our star that communicating with it was not possible.

The image above, taken in the far ultraviolet, was one of the first to come back from STEREO-A, on July 15 (around the same time New Horizons was sailing past Pluto 15 times farther away from us). At this wavelength, magnetic activity glows fiercely, and you can easily see the towering loops of the Sun’s complex magnetic field piercing the surface and arcing a hundred thousand kilometers above the surface.

I mentioned in a recent post that I met astronaut Chris Hadfield at Comic-Con in early July. Chris is the real deal: He is a friendly, funny, warm, intelligent, and hard-working human being who truly and passionately wants to make the world a better place.

One way to do that is to get more people interested in science. To do that, he’s helping create (and starring in!) an animated comedy science series called “It’s Not Rocket Science,” which will premier this fall.

Advertisement

The series is being made with the help of his son, Evan. It was Evan’s idea for his dad to make the “Space Oddity” video, in case you’re wondering if Evan is up to the task (he edited it all together, too). Evan has also been helpful to me a few times pinning down some of the photos from space Chris took when he was on the International Space Station, too.

As for the animation, rest assured that’ll be great too. How do I know? Because my friends Tracy King And DC Turner are doing that! They made Tim Minchin’s brilliant song “Storm” into an equally brilliant animated video.

The animated series will be free on YouTube, but they’re supporting it via Patreon. If you pledge to it, you can get lots of bonuses, like graphics, wallpapers, mention in the credits, and even signed swag from Chris.

They’re making 10 videos, and I am seriously really excited to see them! This is a fantastic team of people, and I know the series will be great.

So throw some filthy lucre their way, and keep your brain ready for this. You’ll be glad you did. In the meantime follow Chris, Evan, Tracy, and DC on Twitter, to keep up with the news on the show.